Lordstown: Yesterday's Rebels are Running scared
JUNKERMAN, JOHN
Labors Uphill Struggle BY JOHN JUNKERMAN Lordstown: Yesterday's Rebels Are Running Scared The change in attitude was astounding. Last October, United Auto Workers local president Rudy Gasparek...
...At auto plants throughout the country, rnanagement is pitting local against local in a scramble for the spots it chooses to refill...
...The insurgent Lordstown leaders cast themselves as hard-core militants who would lead the UAW and all of organized labor into battle...
...The auto industry is in the midst of an $80 billion investment program to rebuild all of the nation's 260-odd factories by 1985...
...he's out oh the street...
...And the new production systems are making Lordstown-style resistance increasingly difficult UAW headquarters in Detroit...
...The modest recovery experienced by the industry in recent months provided an opportunity to tame the Lordstown workers...
...Some were Vietnam vets, others were hard-driving fugitives from rural Appalachian poverty...
...If it brings a convulsion in this country, fine...
...Last November, after Fraser announced his own intention to retire, the board met in closed session to decide once again on a successor...
...Management style has changed with the times, and we have also mellowed...
...The international union would have supported it...
...The supervisor would give a direct order to do a job...
...The Lords-town workers rebelled not because they were a new breed of worker, but because they were being asked to do something that had never been done before—produce 100 cars an hour, twice the standard assembly line speed at the time...
...The same words can be heard every day throughout the auto industry, where labor-management cooperation is the current gospel...
...The alternative is increasing irrelevance...
...Gary Ford, a former union officer, adds, "People are running scared, and they use that as a wedge...
...Reuther won in a very close race, receiving only 50.7 per cent of the votes at the national convention...
...We've mellowed as a plant," says management spokesman Dave Perrow...
...Others see smoldering fires of resentment that are likely to burst into flame under the right conditions...
...They would take people one after another and throw them out of the plant," says Gary Bryner, president of the local during the 1970s and now on the staff at Democracy Inaction In 1946, a vice president of the United Auto Workers named Walter Reuther challenged incumbent President R.M...
...The repair lots filled with crippled Vegas until production was shut down...
...For instance, the cushion room at Lords-town, a stronghold of local leadership, on notice for six months, has responded by surpassing all production standards...
...GM has certainly not forgotten how to play hardball, and the combined forces of new technology, outsourcing, and the changing competitive environment provide it with plenty of opportunities...
...Bieber won unopposed at the convention in Dallas...
...Roy Majerus, secretary treasurer, was the early front-runner...
...There had never been a real contest for the office...
...Leeds, Kansas, and Lordstown—that the most productive and cooperative plant of the three would be rewarded with the reinstatement of its second shift...
...Partly because of increased technological control and partly because of more sophisticated approaches to the work force, management has softened its authoritarianism...
...But to the extent that the economy experiences recovery, the union will be able to stabilize its position, at least for a few years...
...Before he was killed in a plane crash in 1970, Reuther had been re-elected president twelve times...
...Janesville won that round after agreeing to increase line speed and institute other efficiency measures...
...It was reported as being an exotic kind of new strike," says UAW Vice President Don Ephlin, "but it was just the response to a good old-fashioned speedup...
...But the only time we're aggressive is when someone is trying to do a number on us...
...But in his farewell address on the first day of the convention that year, Woodcock announced to the delegates that the succession had been "worked out" and that Fraser would be the only candidate...
...The 1984 round of bargaining will be especially critical if the union is to win any firm guarantees of job security and power in the workplace...
...Delegates to the May convention underscored the undemocratic nature of the selection process by rejecting a proposal to grant each UAW member the right to vote for the union's top officers, a proposal vigorously opposed by members of the international executive board...
...The only way to get any relief was to let the cars go unfinished...
...Nor has there been another since 1946—a record that stands in sharp contrast to the democratic reputation of the UAW (though such practices tend to be the rule rather than the exception in American labor...
...We've given supervisors additional people training...
...Most of this production is slated to take place at Big Three affiliates in the Third World...
...In these circumstances, the local caved in, giving GM a free hand to reorganize the production process, redefine jobs, and pare the work force...
...Some who have taken a recent look at the early 1970s image of young rabble-rousing Ohio hotheads have found them older, cooler, and more frightened, and thus more willing to bend...
...Fraser was elected without opposition...
...It's not that the will to resist is gone, Gasparek insists...
...The automakers' clout against the union is not likely to fade soon: Only 35,000 of 160,000 laid-off Big Three workers had been recalled by June...
...We know that if we keep the adversarial relationship, we're all going to be out of business...
...One person would refuse, they'd send him home, then turn to the next guy, who would also refuse, and so on down the line," he remembers...
...Again, the contrast is obvious: A 1974 strike was called over a backlog of several thousand grievances and lasted forty-six days...
...The Lordstown work force was indeed young ten years ago: The average age was twenty-four...
...In 1977, Woodcock reached the mandatory retirement age and three vice presidents became candidates to succeed him...
...In one stretch there were 1,400 people disciplined...
...On the first ballot, the vote was tied, 13-to-13, between him and Vice President Owen Bieber...
...Gasparek's new rhetoric is all too familiar...
...Vegas emerged from the line jangling loose parts, keys broken off in the ignition, windshields smashed...
...When they sabotaged the Chevy Vegas on the assembly lines, when they pelted plant managers with rivets and bolts, and when they strode off the job in wildcat strikes, they provided a perfect peg for a Playboy story or a 60 Minutes feature: The Baby Boom Goes to Work...
...Threats and rumors of planned outsourcings are frequently circulated to win a new concession or quiet a restless department...
...sisted the rush to embrace GM Chairman Roger Smith's "new alliance...
...He was an administrative assistant to President Walter Reuther and a member of the international executive board of the UA W from 1962 to 1972...
...Their goals are the same— they're out to achieve the best they can for the corporation at the expense of the union—but their tactics have changed...
...We met the challenge head on," Gasparek reported...
...Woodcock had for years been called Reuther's "heir apparent...
...He also preserved the UAW's one-faction system, perpetuating the board's control over the union...
...Fraser yielded, allowing Woodcock to win the presidency by a board vote of 13-to-12...
...There were some tactics," Brooks laughs, "that weren't like canasta...
...It was the only way to stop the line...
...The local-famed for its outspoken opposition to GM's Vega production system in the early 1970s-had taken a leading role in the rank-and-file movement that almost derailed $3 billion in wage and benefit concessions granted by the UAW to GM in the spring of 1982...
...Lordstown is no longer at the cutting edge of assembly automation...
...Some 20 per cent of GM's parts and 40 per cent of Ford's are already contracted out domestically, often to firms that pay half the wages of the Big Three...
...The Vegas moved by every thirty-six seconds, with but five seconds of recovery time between operations...
...The Lordstown workers felt powerless to stop the change in rest break procedures, which has since spread throughout the GM Assembly Division...
...Some 130,000 workers at the major manufacturers and more than 700,000 in the supply industry have permanently lost their jobs...
...they tightened every one up...
...But board members, who would pick the successor to serve out the remainder of Reuther's term, were informed that Reuther had lost confidence in Woodcock...
...We've got a close working relationship with management now...
...But this media image trivialized what was happening at Lordstown...
...They're loading up jobs in the plant, and people are doing them, where a few years ago they wouldn't have gotten away with it...
...Today, the leader of a wildcat...
...Young, Free-spirited Rebels Say Shove It to the American Work Ethic...
...About 5 per cent of the average American-made car is now produced overseas, mostly in Japan, and a University of Michigan study predicts this figure will reach 26 per cent by 1985 and 36 per cent by 1990...
...All the jobs were overworked...
...The concessions squeezed from it last year were only the beginning of sacrifices expected of labor in the creation of a "leaner, meaner" auto industry...
...Gasparek is now taking a much softer line: "Everybody in the plant has realized the predicament we're in with world competition," he told me recently...
...These are the practices that have helped transform Lordstown, once a national symbol of the Blue Collar Blues and worker rebellion, into a model of labor-management cooperation...
...Lordstown has even been used as the testing ground for new work practices: Last summer, the plant became the first within GM to adopt the mass relief system, in which all assembly workers take their breaks at the same time instead of being spelled in rotation by "tag relief" crews...
...Thomas for the leadership of the union...
...We've conceded and helped, put our best foot forward," he says...
...Last October, United Auto Workers local president Rudy Gasparek stood in the sun-streaked union hall in Lordstown, Ohio, and declared angrily that the UAW had already let General Motors take back too many hard-won gains...
...Lordstown won...
...Campaigning to elect Walter Reuther president of the union was an exciting experience for our people," wrote Clayton Fountain in his book, Union Guy...
...After several years of rapidly advancing production technology, Lordstown is no longer at the cutting edge of assembly automation...
...Realizing that Fraser might have enough votes to carry the day, Woodcock threatened to challenge Fraser's leadership at the next convention unless he backed off...
...Ten years ago, we would have wild-catted over tag relief," notes Dan Brooks, a shop steward at the time of the Lordstown labor "wars...
...GMAD came in like a bunch of stormtroppers," recalls Dan Brooks...
...They're not as blunt as they used to be," Lordstown local vice president Bill Bowers says...
...The production systems they will employ are a generation beyond the Vega method and rely on built-in controls that will make Lordstown-style resistance increasingly difficult...
...The Vega was the American auto industry's first attempt to counter the competition from the small imports that were beginning to encroach on the domestic market...
...The move eliminated 300 jobs per shift while subjecting 3,000 workers to the indignity and frustration of scrambling for coffee and access to the toilet...
...last winter, Gasparek reported, the grievance list was reduced to 250, the lowest it has been in the history of the plant...
...The GM plant is the largest remaining employer in the depressed Youngstown-Warren industrial belt, where the unemployment rate chronically exceeds 20 per cent...
...To enforce a production system that demanded superhuman effort, the GM Assembly Division brought in tough line management...
...Either we get people back on their feet, or we're buried," Gasparek declared last fall...
...Whether this mellowing achieves anything more than just making the plant a slightly more pleasant place to work is doubtful...
...By the time management dangled the carrot of a second shift, the 4,000 laid-off auto workers had exhausted their unemployment benefits...
...When car sales began to climb last winter, GM informed workers at its three "J" car plants—Janesville, Wisconsin...
...The production system, designed by industrial engineers, was the logical and practical limit of Henry Ford's assembly line...
...In the months that followed, GM took the Lordstown concessions to the remaining "J" car plants and repeated the competition for a second shift...
...But there is such a thing as going too far...
...But Bieber won on the second round, 15-to-11, thanks to the private but decisive support he received from Fraser...
...Four months later, GM not only got more—a faster assembly line, sweeping job changes, and a reduced work force—but got it with the union's cooperation...
...We more or less tightened the belt, absorbed a little line speed, took on extra work here and there...
...This shifted the balance over to Fraser's side...
...But Lordstown has since buckled, demonstrating the leverage auto manufacturers hold over the UAW...
...Lordstown, once the enfant terrible of the GM Assembly Division, had long reJohn Junkerman, a free-lance writer in Boston, specializes in economic issues...
...If it comes down to moving the cushion room out, we may have a strike...
...GM knew that if they eliminated tag relief at Lords-town, they could shove it down anyone's throat," says John Russo, director of the labor studies program at nearby Youngs-town State University...
...It made extensive use of automated equipment and was remarkably efficient, except that it sparked instant rebellion...
...Another potent weapon wielded by management is "outsourcing," the subcontracting of manufacturing operations...
...There's a line that's going to be drawn," he warned, his voice booming off the walls...
...It was probably the most regimented, minutely divided assembly process ever devised...
...Paul Schrade (Paul Schrade is a member of UA W Local 887 at Rockwell International...
...He did so "to keep the union from being disrupted by a two-year contest for the presidency," Fraser said later...
...Computers will monitor individual performance and machinery will be self-regulating...
...Within a few years, Reuther's faction had consolidated power, gaining control of every office on the international executive board and every staff job in the union...
...Leonard Woodcock and Douglas Fraser, vice presidents of the union at the time of Reuther's death, immediately announced their candidacies for the union's top office...
...The coming decade, while unlikely to be as traumatic as the last, will see a steady weakening of the union's role in the auto industry...
...Doing a number on us," however, has a different meaning today from the one it had a decade ago...
...They've got all that cash in their hands, they're burping on their steaks, and they keep asking for more...
...When the plant returned to full production, it did so with 15 per cent fewer employees...
...We sit down with management now and talk things out with them," he explained...
Vol. 47 • August 1983 • No. 8
